I sent then the following (unpublished) letter in response to
the column:

Bagehot (February 4th)
posits a new party, On The Move!, formed by right Labour MPs after their poor
results in a 2020 General Election, breaking the mould of British politics. But
how well would a new SDP fare in changed circumstances after the rise of UKIP
and the SNP?

And why would MPs like Jess Phillips (the
projected leader of OTM!) want to leave Labour anyway? The Corbyn wing has
withdrawn from battle by opposing compulsory reselection of candidates. Right
Labour MPs are likely to reassert control after he goes. If Corbyn should lead
Labour to victory, the Right may vote for their own choice to lead the
parliamentary party and so probably be Prime Minister. Possession of
nine-tenths of MPs would mean that these 'rebels' would run the Labour party.

Despite having many more members, could Labour really be eclipsed by UKIP?

William Gladstone
did not have a Liverpudlian accent. If he had acquired any of the distinctive
tones from either the city where he was born or from Seaforth, a few miles north
along the Mersey and where he moved when very young, he may have left these
behind at Eton. Paul Nuttall, the new Leader
of UKIP was born in Bootle, located midway between Gladstone's early homes, and he was educated
at a comprehensive school. Mr Nuttall speaks with the sounds of Merseyside but
will he appeal to the Labour heartlands there and beyond in the way that Gladstone once enjoyed support
from the 'labouring classes'?

Mr
Nuttall's claim in his leadership victory speech that UKIP plans "to replace
Labour" may not be absurd. The party has a sole MP but received 3.9
million votes in the last General Election and it is consistently ahead of the
Liberal Democrats in recent polls. The Brexit end-game may prove favourable to
them. It has a smaller membership than the Greens but being a member of a
British political party entails no significant commitment; canvassing and
leafleting is easily avoided and emailed financial appeals may be deleted
unread.

There may also
be other reasons for the usual bonhomie of Mr Nuttall. UKIP, like its vague
counterpart over the ocean in Donald Trump, and in line with some similarly
positioned Eurosceptic parties across the Channel, may benefit more from new political
models than will Britain's
traditional parties of government. These changes include not only the
accelerating rate of obsolescence of the likes of election committee rooms and
door-knocking but also the lessening impact of more recent innovations that parties
used to maximise their electoral impact such as communications planning and
swift rebuttal. The value of the direct channels from major parties to the
large media outlets is also diminishing.

The radical
right is proving to be nimbler at garnering support in elections through its direct
to voter communication. Donald Trump fetes Nigel Farage (and so, by extension,
UKIP) whilst also having a global influence on the right insurgent movement;
national boundaries notwithstanding. Mr Trump may well have something to say
about the outcome of next week's Supreme Court case in London regarding how Brexit should be
triggered, especially if the government loses. Any such one-liner from the
President-elect may be seen by more in Britain than any comment on the
same matter by the Leader of Labour or the Liberal Democrats and maybe even the
Prime Minister. Mr Trump talks to the world louder and on more frequencies than
recent predecessors. That last most-transformative US president, Ronald Reagan, did
not have Twitter. Even Mr Farage, no longer a party leader and maybe even soon
to be based in the United States, could continue to have more purchase on
British politics than the leaders of smaller political parties.

Using
alternative forms of communication, the Trump-inspired populist right is both
making the news on emotive Brexit issues; such as free movement and the single
market; continuing payments; as well as benefitting from the public debate on
these matters and issues like immigration from beyond the EU. This discussion
is no longer just with neighbours at the bus-stop but spreads widely online.

Labour has
increased its membership considerably since Ed Miliband's leadership to about 550,000.
This year, Professor Tim Bale estimated the membership of the Conservative
Party to be between 130,000 and 150,000. UKIP membership fell between the two
leadership elections held by them since last year's General Election and it is currently
about 32,000. Less than 20,000 of these members voted in each of the two
leadership contests held this year; the total vote in Thursday's Richmond Pak
by-election will see more votes cast.

But is
Labour showing any benefit from having more members than the rest? Despite a
lead in the number of members at the time of last year's General Election, the
Tories received 21% more votes than them. 50% more electors currently say they
intend to vote Tory next time, compared to Labour. The number of UKIP votes last
year was 42% of the number of Labour votes. Mr Nuttall's claim that the views
and interests of Jeremy Corbyn are not those of most Labour voters outlines his
plan of how he hopes his party will grow by eating Labour's lunch. Will it be
that no matter of old-style momentum and even a continuing growth in membership
will pick-up Labour and save them from a possible future not yet as calamitous
as they have suffered in Scotland
but still resolutely downwards?

More members may not mean more votes

A Labour
Party activist told me that "lots have joined but we never see them. It is
too easy for them to click to join and then forget." Might the day loom when
there are influential British political parties without any but a handful of members?
The motor for this could not just be the ability for politicians to go direct
to the pubic but the general decline in voluntary activity that has seen PTAs
shut and sports club committees fold. There may be parties consisting of just a
small group of thinkers or executives, possibly working in the orbit of a
wealthy donor and awarding local franchises to those that will work for them? Aaron
Banks, a major financial contributor to UKIP, has spoken about forming a
"brand new party". Silvio Berlusconi led and has not yet fully lost a
movement built in his image. The Referendum Party of Jimmy Goldsmith did not
plant any lasting oaks but did provide seedlings for UKIP.

Trump has
shown that even with a media that dislikes you or indeed, with a large section
of the public that has very negative views about you, success is possible for
those whose radical views resonate with many other voters.The Brexit winds may buffet the long-established
parties more so than those with a thinner profile. Could UKIP, with its ability
to attract far more voters per party member than the much bigger parties rise
yet further, perhaps in tandem with a continuing demise of Labour?

29 July 2016

When planning rail journeys, I've had to spent longer than should be necessary through having to check a few rail websites to ensure I get the most suitable ticket. It's frustrating that I can't be confident enough to just enter my details and buy.

You can't be sure that you are
getting all the train and ticket price information you need from even the authoritative websites, such as the National Rail Enquiries website (run by
the Association of Train Operating Companies - ATOC), or at the train operating companies
own individual websites as well as on the websites of third parties. Government can get energy companies to now offer understandable and complete price information; why can't similar happen with rail?

Hidden Trains

Rail websites - including NRE and the train operating companies' own sites - don't list some trains. Read the
exchange (from the bottom) that I had on Twitter last month with NRE about this
problem:

This week, The Times has run a series of articles
reporting about this 'hidden trains' flaw, as well as about other problems such as how rail companies
won't tell you how you can save money by splitting tickets. That's when you buy a ticket,
say from London to Coventry and from Coventry to Manchester, that might be cheaper
than a ticket from London to Manchester. You can use these split tickets on the same train,
as long as it stops in Coventry and with no need to change at that intermediate station.

In response to this negative coverage, the rail industry appears
to have realised it needs to make some conciliatory noises. But are they moving their
position as much as they are suggesting?

Airline style ticketing

In today's Times, there's a further article about rail fares and which has a misleading comment that is attributed to the Rail Delivery Group - RDG (a rail trade
body - Network Rail and the train and freight operating companies). It's announcing
as new - and with a fanfare - something that has been long established: Airline style ticketing.

This pick 'n' mix style ticketing,
that is proclaimed in the article, has been here for a long time. Look at this example from the National
Rail Enquiries (NRE) website, for a trip from London
to Manchester and
back, today, with outward travel during peak time and return travel off-peak.

You can buy the Anytime return for£322but it's
cheaper to 'pick 'n' mix & buy an Anytime single (£166) out & an Off-peak single
for the return (£41.20) for a total of £207.20. But it's no big deal - most people know that's what you do; buy two differently priced singles rather than buy a peak return ticket if you are only travelling during the peak period in one direction. So this is hardly the "better and more transparent" deal that the RDG claim.

Unpublicised tickets I was pleased to see the RDG stating in today's article that "Passengers would be
given the option of slower, cheaper trains". But will all the 'hidden'
trains be publicised? That's the issue covered in the tweets above but let me
give more detail:

Look at these screenshots from NRE and London Midland websites for travel this morning from London Euston to Perry Barr.

Note
how the 0749 London Midland train is not listed by NRE. It's a much slower journey but it
has only the same single change (at Birmingham
New Street station) as the faster journeys that include Virgin Trains (London to Birmingham). But this alternative by London Midland only is £36
cheaper.

Unnecessary delay?

The RDG also say today that "most of
the changes it was suggesting required government approval." Really?
What's to stop NRE listing the hidden trains on their website straightaway?

6 March 2012

Travelling through Dagenham it's no longer possible to
orientate by the prominent pubs that used to punctuate the repeating pattern of uniform housing.

The pubs are gone. Now it's only passing the shops stuck to the stations that gives you a sense of movement.

And going down road after
road of off-white and pebble-dash ‘Homes fit for Heroes’ you can't imagine you're on your way to
a football club that's only twenty years old.

When you get there, nothing about the place gives you any impression of modernity. Dagenham
and Redbridge FC play in a former factory football club site that has been used as such since 1917. Backing onto an industrial estate, the ground is also next to some of that flat,
scrag-end land that passes for open space around here. I bought the programme complete with an ad for a firm of
pawnbrokers with photos of the World War One medals that they'd be happy
to take
off your hands.

I went to the game because I
thought it might my last chance to watch the club that cannily bears
the name of the borough where I live whilst Dagenham
and Redbridge are still one of the
ninety-two.

It
was good to be back in a ground that you can walk around, at least along the
two terraced sides. The site, and the walk around, reminded me of Millwall’s
Old Den. Both tattered grounds were situated alongside the scruffier end of the
motor trade.

At the Daggers' ground, Don Autos and Boston
Garage Equipment both have ads. Diamond Cars, a minicab firm, sponsored this match.
The programme had a picture of bloke, with a car hood up, mending the car engine. The auto repair place, next to the stadium, had vehicles out front with sprayed on
notes like ‘airbag deployed’ or ‘boot will not open’.

A benefit of the anaemic history of the Daggers
means
that it's unlikely that there will be any similar ‘upgrading’ to their
stadium as happened to the Lions. Millwall’s New Den is designed
for everything save any way of retaining atmosphere. Dagenham and Redbridge FC's Victoria Road
oozes Seventies football.

If
not motors, then the building trade is the other theme of Victoria Road.
The ground has a ‘Traditional
Builders Stand’ as well as ads for roofers and for a college course that
teaches how to hang a door. Daggers aren’t going to attract too many
Arsenal or
even West Ham fans squeezed by ticket prices.

The overwhelmingly good-natured crowd included many children, and their
mums and dads, who were attending as part of a cheap entry promotion - a total of 3,041 including 345 in the Bradford end. These numbers were double that of their at home five-nil humiliation by Cheltenham a
fortnight previously. It
was a bright, spring-like day.

Daggers bore the name of West and Coe, undertakers, on their
shirts. A
hospice was the match’s charity of the day. With just one season in
League One, and their recent bumping along the bottom of League Two, the club must
be facing the possibility of being despatched to non-League after just five
years. But with Dagenham winning up
North against tough Morecambe in the week, would today see a further resurrection
and movement from being second bottom in the league?

Bradford City were all in black as befits their recent
history. It is one hundred and one years
since Bradford won their only honour, the FA Cup. It is eleven years since
they were in the Premiership. Now, as the lowest ranked of all ex Premier
sides, they may well be the first of their former peers to go down to the Conference.

First half

The game stopped just when it started because of a foul by Bradford
City, who saw their Matt Fry booked. But City started well; workhorse Kyel Reid was knocking in cross and after cross from the left-wing. He was nearly
rewarded after ten minutes where, with the Daggers keeper beaten, only a goal line kick
away by Jon Nurse stopped City from opening the scoring. Later Reid demonstrated
a feisty overhead kick to stop the conceding of a throw-in.

And then, five minutes before half-time, Reid, a graduate of
the West Ham Academy (so maybe not too far from home) seemed more influenced by his
now Northern base and momentarily dropped the Association code and delivered an
excellent rugby league conversion over the crossbar.

An unwelcome interval

The half-time
interval featured ‘Sign Up Against Racism Day’ with a phalanx of dignitaries posing
mid-pitch with their pens. They included the Chief Executive of the local council, the London
Borough of Barking and Dagenham (who have the naming rights for the ground) as
well as a Tory prospective parliamentary candidate (for the local constituency that was maybe only
won by Labour last time because one in nine voters cast their ballot for the
BNP) and the Head of Public Affairs at Canary Wharf.

The
latter must have felt that he had never travelled a longer ten miles than that between
the glistening totem towers of the future of British capitalism and the industrial
elephants’ graveyard that is Dagenham, complete with the near carcass of Ford, once
Britain’s biggest industrial site.

He
really need not have bothered. Nobody from the crowd that I could see paid any
attention as they took part in this signing ritual.
The event was not too far distant from the actions of prim Edwardian matrons from
the Temperance movement coming to the East End to lecture locals about the evils of
the demon drink.

It's wrong to abuse the patience of the crowd to deliver what are now hegemonic views on race, or climate change, or whatever. Just because there's a captive crowd of a few thousand
doesn’t mean that they're there as your audience.

Not
content with this half-time proselytising, the Daggers programme also
carried a council ad suggesting people should ‘Celebrate St George’s Day’ as if a local
authority can spark genuine festivities in such a manner.

World
War Two Britain saw endless lectures about saving waste food for pig
swill or bathing in just a couple of inches of water. But something happened by
the Sixties that made these patronising lectures, even with often useful messages,
a cause of irritation to many. People realised they no longer had to listen and they switched off. It's a cause of
regret that football fans today seem resigned to accepting that they can’t just
watch a ball be kicked about but also have to be ‘educated’ at the same time.

This
top-down approach doesn't work and this
official ‘anti-racism’ has some strange outcomes. No presumption of
innocence for John Terry; Luis Suarez found ‘guilty’ by a previously unknown
court of the land, the Football Association.

And the news about this match being part of ‘Daggers Against Racism
Family Fun Day’ found little echo at the interface of the Dagenham and the Bradford
fans on the terrace. I saw the aftermath of the nasty racist abuse of a group
of twelve to fourteen year old Asian Bradford fans by Daggers supporters, who were aged in
their late teens and early twenties. I saw the line of stewards and cops separating the few bigots
and some Bradford fans and then the continuing invective being jabbed by a few Dagenham
and Redbridge supporters over the thin line of security guard yellow and police
black.

It's interesting how Bradford City have many Asian
fans, albeit from a city that maybe has a majority Asian population. That's in
stark contrast to West Ham, located in the heart of overwhelmingly Asian Newham,
which has a fan base that's very nearly all Essex whites. It's this
multi-racial Bradford support, a grassroots approach, that will really ‘kick
racism out of football’ a lot better than the organisation with the same name
ever will.

Dagenham and Redbridge FC made a strong
statement condemning the racism after the match. But the Daggers’ fans, at the
time of writing, have made near 200 posts on a forum that are mostly expressing disgust at this incident but also suggesting practical ideas about how to oppose such bigotry.

Second half

From
late in the first half and for most of the second, Dagenham and Redbridge were
dominant.

Bradford’s Deane Smalley, looking all the world from the
back like a pause button, with his number 11 on his black shirt, was
inexplicably not pushed until the sixtieth minute when he became the first of
his side to be substituted.

And then, seventy minutes in, came the only goal. Preceded by
a dummy, Daggers' Matthew Saunders hit the free kick straight into the net. The scorer
then immediately hobbled off with his left leg in pain and was carried
round the pitch in fireman’s lift. With the Dagenham crowd now chanting for the first time, their
team immediately got in close again with good cross by Nurse.

And in the last minutes, Daggers’ Brian Woodall was briefly
one on one with City’s keeper until his lack of pace gave retreating Bradford defenders
time to catch up and so forced the Dagenham player to shot square, directly to the goalkeeper.

One-nil to Dagenham and Redbridge was a fair result for a
contest that saw Bradford fail to profit from their early promise in the game. The Yorkshire fans roughly shook the pull-out tunnel entrance
cover from above as their team left the pitch.

29 September 2011

With three years or less until it again has chance of
power, you may have thought that Labour would be engaged at its present conference
in some debate about where it wants to go. You might also expect that it would be seeking some insight
into why it came off the road.

But a spectator watching Labour's Liverpool gathering over the last few
days would probably get the impression that many delegates think they are driving solo -
up for their own political X Factor audition, rather than discussing how best to
get those Xs against a Labour candidate’s name. The moving of policy discussions to the National Policy Forums and policy commissions has done its job.

So the conference watchwords have been ‘anecdotes, advice or
accomplishments’ - do you want to know what the NHS was like in the 1990s; would
you benefit from some personal public health pointers or would you be interested
in knowing about the fab school/hospital/charity that the speaker leads?

And the plan for the event appears to be: you can do the politics and discussion elsewhere; at conference we are going to educate and inform you.

The theatre of dullness

On Monday, amongst the many speakers I watched on TV, only the delegate from Maidstone & the
Weald - sixteen-year-old Rory Weal - had any vim. He was rewarded with a paternal
hand on the shoulder from Miliband for his speech about how his family has been
saved from penury by the welfare state, but without him mentioning his father, a former millionaire property developer. I wish I could lay money on Weal's political future.

At Labour conferences in the past more delegates were like Weal - providing political theatre and never shy about the limelight. And those from the socialist redoubt
constituencies, like Islington North, used to add many fireworks. Yet the
present day delegate from that place was quite so underwhelming that my pen expired
when trying to record her name.

Other speakers also made politics-free contributions. During the time spent on the Education and Skills 'debate', Andrew
Chubb, an Academy head from East Yorkshire, took the opportunity to deliver the speech, that he is
doubtless repeating around now to the parents of his next year’s prospective
intake, about the successes of his
school. Maybe Labour conference is the place for sales propositions; it might help the
connected take their school, or other brand, national.

Only many delegates should more carefully check the timings
of these pitches. Several less
polished speakers, who had clearly spent time penning their surgically crafted phrases,
ended up just throwing them away. Flustered and over their allotted time, they spewed
them out, rapid-fire, over an irritated chair telling them to ‘wind up now’.

I wonder if many of these speakers were surprised that these
signature soundbites that they used were identical to those spoken by others on the conference stage.
Were ‘Key Conference Phrases’ Lucky Bags on sale to delegates arriving at Lime St. Station.

Pzazz this party conference doesn’t possess. And as a sympton of
that, whether good or bad, Labour leaders have been bereft of any rhetorical
flourish since Kinnock. Miliband just hasn’t got it.

And many conference delegates, despite the
well into middle age profile of most of them, seem to haveno gumption or presence - little historical or other political knowledge outside
the here and now.

They will borrow, willy-nilly, a useful sounding phrase from a scrapbook of political
terms. So in the ‘Prosperity and Work’ discussion, any lingering members of the ‘red
shirt, red tie, red socks, red underpants’ brigade must have been startled to
hear, from Tony Burke of Unite, that what was needed was an “Alternative
Economic Strategy”.

But no, it was not the return of that centre piece of Labour
policy from 30 years previously, but just a random phrase that the union man had
chanced upon.

The key speakers

And the star turns? The First Minister of Wales, Carwyn Jones (looking like a member
of the Cambrian branch of the family of the Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley)spoke like his speech had been written
by the ‘Visit Wales’ PR team.

Whatever original thought had been inputted into his address
must then have been overwritten by the software that is clearly in to make sure all the
key phrases go in, and for the requisite number of times, into all the speeches of
the leading players. “We can make that future a reality” said Jones, with maybe
a hint of embarrassment.

What are the political problems in Wales? What contribution
or changes to Labour party policy might the leading Welsh member have in mind? If the First Minister knew, he was not inclined
to say. “Thanks very much for that inspirational speech, Carwyn” replied the
Conference Chair, without even a smidgen of irony.

Or Ed Balls? Looking very sharply dressed, he read out what
had been given out, and well reported upon, hours before he walked up to the
rostrum.

Apart from that it
was hard to tell whether Balls was more animated expounding his revisionist
views of the tasks of the Labour Party (“Working night and day to make savings and cut
bureaucracy”) or puckering up to kiss Harriet Harman after his speech when she
was still far across the stage.

And so on to next week’s
Conservative party conference. With the dark storm clouds over the economy and the future of the
Euro as well as the compromises with the Liberal Democrats, can it possibly be as apolitical as Labour’s?

23 August 2011

Set in Southwest USA, 'Cowboy Noir' cinema shows that smalltown or wide open settings can be as close as crowded cities

Cowboy Noir

Watching Kill Me Again (John Dahl, 1989) once more, I was reminded how much I like a certain group of films.

These films appear to be a genre, but it had escaped me if anyone had identified them as such. I was going to call them 'Cactus Noir' but a little digging meant I found out they have already have a name – Cowboy Noir.

A Cowboy Noir film may well start with a sap rolling into a small town. When travelling there he will be hitchhiking a ride, driving either a stolen car or one running out of gas, or be ticketless on a train.

After he arrives, one of his first stops will be at a bar. The guy behind the counter will either ignore him, despite him being the first customer of the day, or silently appraise him as a contender for a con he's considering.

The atmosphere in a Cowboy Noir is languid. They would have no need of a thermometer that goes below 75. If the film isn’t based on a Jim Thompson book, it 's from not far away. Actors called Walsh - J.T or M. Emmet are often in supporting roles.

Right from the get-go, the guy knows he should drink up and move on, even if has to tackle the surrounding desert on foot. But he never does, because the femme fatale walks into that bar or his his motel or just bends over in the street, right in front of him, to re-tie a strap on her strapless sandals.

And from early on you know he’s not going to walk away from the forthcoming heist, scam or murder into which he is being ensnared. He won’t walk away, even though it’s clear to all (including him) that it will end with his mugshot in the newspaper that will report his conviction or killing, whilst she gets over the border.

The Cowboy Noir films have some roots in the 40s films where the femme fatale is first seen approaching the frosted glass door of a private eye’s rundown office. But these movies eschew San Francisco or New York for some small town in South West USA.

After Dark, My Sweet (James Foley, 1990) is one of the best. There are several points in the film where you just will Jason Patric’s sap character to move onto to the next town but, a kidnapping and murder later, it’s clear he's only going to be leaving that town if its cemetery is full and they have to bury him elsewhere.

Cowboy Noir films seem to have the ability to get the best out of actors who you may think should have only ever made it onto the small screen.

Nicolas Cage raises his game considerably in Red Rock West (John Dahl, 1992).Don Johnson delivers in The Hot Spot (Dennis Hopper, 1990). Johnson here avoids the usual fatal bullet or knife and ‘escapes’ to a life, not with the woman he loves, but alongside the femme fatale who is going to make every moment from then on feel like he is living under the gun.

Kill Me Again (John Dahl, 1989) is perhaps the runt of the herd. Neither Joanne Whalley-Kilmer, Val Kilmer nor Michael Madsen can really lift the film although Whalley-Kilmer (all the way from Stockport to sandy deserts) flounces around in Film Noir style dresses. Unusually, the sap (Kilmer's character), gets to keep the money after Whalley-Kilmer’s character has made the usual about turn and taken up again with the thug (Madsen's character) whom the sap saved her from in the first place.

Some films bubbling around the edge of the genre include The Last Seduction (John Dahl, 1994) which has many of the features, but not the location as well as both The Getaway (Roger Donaldson, 1994) and Blood Simple (Joel Coen, 1984) which both have the location but with plots that may be beyond the limits of the genre. Grifters (Stephen Frears, 1990) glitters brightly but in a neighbouring constellation.

Adding little but more tinder to the bonfire of ill considered comment about recent events, Sergeant (a fellow of the Centre for Policy Studies [CPS]) uses her article to gives her opinion that the riots were “not about poverty or race” and also to state that “unless we understand the causes of this anarchy and the role that government has played, how can we put it right?”

But the dubious ‘facts’ throughout her article mean anyone using it to try to understand the riots will be chasing phantoms and not provided with any ideas to 'put anything right'.

1. The source for her claim that “A full 63 per cent of white working class boys, and just over half of black Caribbean boys at the age of 14 have a reading age of seven or below” is presumably what she wrote in her own CPS publication of 2009, ‘WASTED’ [i],

In this, she stated “63% of 14 year old white working class boys have a reading ability of half their age. Over half, 54% of 14 year old black Caribbean boys have a reading age of seven” but also that “White working class boys are most at risk of under-performing with 63 per cent unable to read and write properly at 14 compared to 43 per cent of white girls from a similar background. Black working class boys do not do much better. Just over half of them, 54 per cent, can not read or write properly at 14”.

Note “have a reading age of seven or below” only appears in the first of the two passages quoted above from ‘WASTED’.

‘WASTED’ gives the source of the second these claims as a report in the Daily Mail [ii] on 13 August 2007. The Daily Mail article refers to an unnamed Bow Group report but makes no mention of comparison to seven year olds just stating, as in the latter passage in WASTED, that “White working-class boys were found to be most at risk of under-performing, with 63 per cent unable to read and write properly at 14.”

Indeed elsewhere in the Mail article, it is reported that it is just “one in five (14 year old) boys has a reading ability of a pupil half his age.”

I have no idea about the veracity or not of the claim in the Spectator article about so many boys having a reading age half their actual age but I note that a report in the (London) Evening Standard [iii] on 13 August 2008 about the last SATS results for 14 year olds (which were a way of measuring literacy and which were abolished for that age in 2008) that states that “More than one in five (of 14 year old) boys - 21 per cent - have a reading age of nine.”

2. I think Ms Sergeant must have been very unfortunate that the 14 year old boys that she interviewed, and who had dropped out or had been excluded from school’ “only turn(ed) up to school to sell drugs or stolen goods.” Never turn up to do things like meet their siblings there or their friends still attending their school?

3. Her claim, possibly originally known from late 90s research, that “half of the prison population has a reading age below that of an 11-year-old” has been displaced by a more authoritative statistic from 2008, given by Edward Leigh MP, as Chairman of the Committee of Public Accounts, who reported that “nearly 40 per cent (of those in custody) have a reading age lower than that of a competent 11- year old.”[iv][v]

4. Between 2001 and 2009, 12 teachers were ‘struck off’ from teaching for incompetence, not just “suspended”. Being stuck off can be permanent, or for a fixed period.[vi]

5. Sergeant wrongly states “of the 1.8 million new jobs created over the Labour years, 99 per cent went to immigrants”. Rather the number of those in the workforce who were born abroad was equivalent to 88 per cent of the number of extra workers that there were in 2010, compared with 1997 [vii].

6. The unemployed get money designated for council tax and other things such as rent but they don't get money for “utility payments” as the author appears to be stating. If in arrears with the utilities, small sums may be taken directly from benefits to pay towards gas and electricty bills but this isn’t any extra money. [viii]

7. I wonder how current is her claim that “the catering trade alone has recruited 10,000 workers from outside Europe to work in kitchens or as porters or back of house staff”? Sergeant also uses this statistic in her CPS publication WASTED but I see the same statistic was used in the Daily Telegraph [ix] on 14 February 2005.

I thought that Labour’s ‘get tough on immigration’ persona, in its latter years in government, had meant the end of some working visas for such workers and so there may well have been a reduction from the reported 10,000 non-European catering workers, but I do not know the current number of such workers (or how European is defined here: EEA +CH + ?)

8. I would be interested in the source of her statistic that “49 per cent of British parents did not know where their children were in the evenings or with whom. Some 45 per cent of 15 year old boys spent four or more evening a week hanging about ‘with friends’ compared to just 17 per cent in France.”

Certainly if boys are out so often hanging around, I would have thought they must be doing a lot of revision with their friends during this time because 65.4 per cent of boys obtained Grades A* to C in the GSCEs in 2010 [x]

9. Britain has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Western Europe, not Europe.[xi]

10. I do not know if “Since 1997, a single mother of two children has seen her benefits increase by a staggering 85 per cent”, as Sergeant writes, but I do know that inflation between 1997 and 2010 was 41 per cent.[xii]

a) I agree with Damon (5) that lists of facts and figures (as in my article) are dry to read but I also wish that more articles were the result of research and referenced the source of their facts and figures. Opinion pieces can be good to read when well-written, but I’m tired of the multitude of blogs that are just venting.

The author of the Spectator article is a regular talking head and is widely published in the conservative media. She is also a fellow of The Centre for Policy Studies (CPS).

The CPS describe themselves as “one of Britain’s leading think tanks” and with “an outstanding record of influencing government policy”. They claim a whole list of measures that they proposed and which the Coalition government have enacted including “Abolition of school quangos”,” Reform of the Children’s Plan” and “Abolition of the Serious Organised Crime Agency” all of which is stated “have their roots in papers published by the CPS.”

It is such a CPS paper, WASTED, by Sergeant, that forms the basis of some of her incorrect facts in the Spectator article. A paper that also has insufficient sources, like simply “The Daily Mail” of a certain date’. It is alarming if such research really does help determine government policy.

A few years ago I was impressed with the fact-checking of the Economist, when one of their journalists came back to me checking a couple of figures, amongst a lot of information that I had given for his research for an article. These figures were not quite as robust as others, but also very obscure, and it reflected well on that publication that they discovered this and wanted other sources – they did not run with those figures in the end.

As a subscriber to the Spectator, I will be writing to the editor asking him why they do not appear to fact-check and why I should believe anything they write which make uses of statistics or similar in its analysis or arguments.

Clive Power, 19 August 2011

b) Mr Power writes:

“Sergeant wrongly states “of the 1.8 million new jobs created over the Labour years, 99 per cent went to immigrants”. Rather the number of those in the workforce who were born abroad was equivalent to 88 per cent of the number of extra workers that there were in 2010, compared with 1997 [vii].”

Quickly read, this might suggest that Sergeant had written 99 where she should have written 88. That would be a serious mistake but not a significant one. I assume that the number of those in the workforce who were born abroad includes many who were already in work in 1997?

George Brennan, 21 August 2011

c) Yes, she has converged two figures and also done this inaccurately. The workforce increased by more than two million between 1997 and 2010 and it so happens that 88 per cent of that figure (not 99 per cent) happens to be the number of “non-UK born” workers in Britain in 2010.

As well as getting the percentage incorrect, it’s also completely wrong for her to state that either 99 per cent or 88 per cent of the “jobs created over the Labour years… went to immigrants” because, as George Brennan states,“ the number of those in the workforce who were born abroad includes many who were already in work in 1997”.

Sergeant’s error with the percentage may relate to her saying the workforce increased by 1.8 million jobs (not 2 million) between 1997 to 2010. It could be that the percentage error is “a serious mistake but not a significant one”, as George states, but to write (as she does) that just about all new jobs between 1997 and 2010 were taken by immigrants is both a serious and significant error.

Thinking it through – how likely is it that 99 per cent (or 88 per cent) of workers at Sure Start centres throughout the country in 2010, as an example of new jobs created during the Labour government, came from abroad?

Unusually the Daily Mail gives the relevant figures but again with the same ‘misunderstanding’ (being generous) about the migrant part of the workforce summed up in their provocative and wrong headline “Migrants took 9 out of 10 jobs created under Labour.”

Clive Power, 21 August 2011

2. Further and excellent analysis of the fake “A full 63 per cent of white working class boys, and just over half of black Caribbean boys at the age of 14 have a reading age of seven or below.” 'stat' by PaulB in A made-up statistic.

"Today's immigrants are not taking jobs from British workers but rather doing jobs that otherwise would stay vacant: between the spring of 2002 and 2006, migrant workers found 740,000 jobs, while the number of jobs taken by British-born workers remained steady." (Leading article, Spectator, 5 April 2008).

[v]Half of the prison population has a reading age below that of an 11-year-old’ is often accredited to ‘The Moser Report’ [A Fresh Start - improving literacy and numeracy] [DfEE 1999, ref: CMBS 1 http://www.lifelonglearning.co.uk/mosergroup/] although that report contains no such claim.

[vi]“In rare move, GTC orders two-year ban for humanities specialist…Only 11 other teachers have been struck off for incompetence from a workforce of around 500,000 since the GTC was formed in 2001” Times Educational Supplement 16 October, 2009. http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storyCode=6025119

8 August 2011

In its reporting of the Tottenham riot, Twitter, at its best, was faster, more accurate and went places the traditional media didn't

Tottenham riots reporting

The news reporting of the Tottenham and Wood Green disturbances (6/7 August 2011) shows how digital media can lap its more traditional rivals in its coverage of some fast-evolving news events.

The short pipeline of digital news channels is a key advantage, but the working practices of some digital journalists, as well as the sometimes over elaborate nature of news output in the old media, are also contributing to other contenders - non-news professionals on Twitter, YouTube, social networking sites and other new channels - sometimes winning the race to first deliver stories but also, occasionally, to be the only providers of front-line coverage.

Yet where traditional media is able to adapt to digital, it is likely to be able to use its greater resources to again assert dominance.

Police cars on fire

Reading mid-evening on the BBC News website that two police vehicles had been set on fire in Tottenham, I wanted to find out what was the latest news. But I didn't want to wait an indeterminate time for an update either on that site, or on the BBC or Sky rolling TV news channels. I knew that there was only one medium that would get me live (and recent) reporting, and from many different voices - Twitter.

Facebook is too scattergun - whose updates would you follow? How many of those would be public?

YouTube and trawling online for still photos would similarly be hard work and only lead to images and their captions.

Messaging via BlackBerry etc, or even emails or texts would keep you updated, but usually only if you were in the loop in the first place. This method may be a primary tool of those organising but it appears not to be (yet) used much for reporting, although the ability of BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) to apparently not reveal the sender of messages, as well as to transmit a message to many receivers, suggests a future as a reporting tool.

News website live feeds, such as 'live blogs', are useful but can be slow to start and whilst the best will report from lots of different sources, including from other news outlets and from independents, they do not have the variety of Twitter. And their editing process, whilst helpful in ensuring little poor content, also eliminates interesting voices and slows the news output process.

Choosing output

Guessing correctly the best hashtag as #tottenham, I found a sea of posts but very few of these were attempting to report. Nearly all the Twitter feed was exclamations - from disgust to exultation and all points in-between.

And a lot of these comments were based on a perception of what had happened, rather than what the commentator could be sure had occurred. But as the Independent Police Complaint Commission had said, regarding the death of Mark Duggan, that "We do not know the order the shots were fired. We understand the officer was shot first before the male was shot" this confusion was not surprising.

So many tweets disagreed with the original protest that afternoon in Tottenham - ‘why complain about the shooting of someone who had fired at the police?’ But it now transpires that the bullet in the radio was fired not by Duggan, but by the police.

To make Twitter more useful to me in finding out about events, I needed to dispense with those simply forwarding (with varying degrees of honesty) what had already been reported by others. Also needing to be sifted out, as much as possible, were those fabricating ‘news’ (which could get rapidly retweeted; the frequency of which was often based on its creativity, rather than its credibility).

Many hares were set running. Some claimed that they had heard that trouble had broken out in various combinations of Peckham, Brixton and Walthamstow and a few, falsely, claimed that they had witnessed this. Some of this fake ‘news’ attempted to gain acceptance though claiming an authoritative source. Some was rewritten, from a purloined original, but with a ‘first hand account’ angle grafted on top.

But Twitter consumes as well as conceives. There is no better rebuttal to a spurious ‘eye-witness’ tweet about disturbances somewhere, than, for a few minutes later, others on Twitter, at the same claimed location, to point out nothing is happening or even to post photos showing calm.

And another of the strengths of Twitter at rebuttal is its ability for its silence to give an opinion about what is being reported. So when the BBC broadcast an interview with somebody who said the night’s trouble had kicked off because a 16 year old girl was attacked by police at the end of the protest outside Tottenham police station, Twitter helped make me sceptical about whether there had been such an incident because I was struck by the absence of conformation of this incident online. There weren't any photos of this event (there were photos of most everything else) and no-one was claiming to be an eye-witness.

There is a video on YouTube that claims to show this suppsoed incident but you can see little. It has a soundtrack of a woman protesting about an ongoing attack against a girl, but this was clearly taken after night had fallen, long after any event at the end of the protest would have happened.

My surmising from Twitter is that there probably was no such event, or, if it happened, few noticed and so it would not have been a spark. On the BBC, the 'incident' remained with the weight of an unchallenged eyewitness account.

When you dispense with what you see as tweet-chaff, the task is to identify who was worth following of those present in Tottenham. Often through having many followers, and also through many of their tweets being retweeted, those from the traditional media start with the advantage of being more noticeable on Twitter. But newer digital journalists can be prominent as well.

And once I selected who was worth reading, I followed them until they left and then followed others, with these latter sources often obtained through having been linked to by the original journalists.

Nimble or hidebound

The older media I followed included Guardian reporter @PaulLewis; (“Just seen 20 people sprinting around #woodgreen with hands full of looted goods. Fights breaking out. Teen in stolen minicab.”); @ravisomaiya from the New York Times (NYT) (and whose live online coverage, via that newspaper’s home page, completely eclipsed the near absent online coverage on the BBC News website) and, for a while,@rickin_majithia from the BBC.

Amongst the newer media worth following were @jbardrosenberg (“Definitely further rioting in wood green - loads of shops smashed in and the wondscreen of the bus we were on #tottenham”), @counterfireorg (“Orange light is huge burning barricade to stop police advancing on protesters in #tottenhamhttp://twitpic.com/623p6o”) and @aaronjohnpeters (“Interestingly what I saw wasn't gangs but affinity groups of 3-10 - primarily delineated along race - all with a shared purpose”).

The 140 characters of a tweet can lead to pithy, fact based reporting; (@ravisomaiya “Police charged through firewall with dogs. #tottenhamriot”), compared to that staple of rolling news coverage - repetitive, filler news. You don't repeat a tweet.

And whilst reading what those reporters had to say, I also listened to the BBC News and Sky News coverage. And I realised how little I would know if I had to rely on just the latter pair.

Both Sky and the BBC had cameras near police lines that needed to zoom, to the maximum of their capabilities, to only barely obtain pictures of running cops and flames several hundred metres away. But many of the reporters using Twitter appeared to be that several hundred metres up the road - at, or near, the front line.

So when Sky said, at a distance, that the trouble is damping down, the online journalists, a lot closer, were tweeting that it appeared to be kicking off again.

And when Sky reported that a wall of flame was a building on fire, an independent journalist there tweeted that it was a burning barricade.

This disparity in the news coverage only widened as the night went on. At some point, the BBC news crew was attacked by some youths when the fast moving frontline enveloped them whilst they filmed the nearby smashing of a police car.

Many plaintive tweets went out rhetorically asking why the media were being attacked. But you can imagine why the rioters objected to being caught on camera. At about the same time, the Sky News camera was similarly put out of action.

So what did the BBC and Sky News do? They just withdrew. They spent the rest of the night simply repeating old footage and interviewing ‘experts’ who were always a very long way from the event. Even those not involved with filming, such as the BBC’s @rickin_majithia left - he tweeted that they had all been ordered ‘back to Base.’

The major media - both broadcast and print (with the exception of the Guardian and the NYT) did not attempt to put journalists on the ground like others were doing - not filming, not maybe even taking photos, but just watching and tweeting.

So by 0230 several journalists on Twitter were reporting looting in Wood Green (2 km from Tottenham) but this was not being mentioned by either the BBC or Sky, in any of their news formats, when I went to bed at 0400.

And this lack of knowledge of what was occurring diminished the capacity of media, like Sky and the BBC, to report accurately. Earlier in the evening they were broadcasting the police saying that the situation was contained and they had no way of checking this.

But the digital media knew better with the Guardian’s @PauLewis tweeting then, “If police indeed are saying #tottenhamriot "contained", that is absolutely not true. It is mayhem.”

Future news

Occasions like Tottenham and other mass participation and multi-site news events can not be reported just by an immobile broadcast crew. Journalists need to be moving and sometimes unobtrusive.

In some circumstances they may be able to take photos and video. But even when journalists are just tweeting, it is mistaken to think that the major media can still broadcast live, or later print, news that was contradicted online at the time without the major media becoming progressively less credible.

And independent journalists can make an impact in these circumstances. The longer that older media doesn’t adapt, the bigger that impact could be.